Friday, December 04, 2009

Thursday, December 03, 2009

A couple of months ago I had a conversation with Kendal Cronkhite (Production Designer for Madagascar 1&2) and Shannon Jeffries (Art Director for Madagascar 1&2) about how we can share and improve our artistic skills outside of work. So we came up with an idea to create a collaborative blog with all artists from the Art Department here at PDI/DreamWorks to draw and paint to a certain topic that would be picked every month.

The Blog is called "Travisty's Beard"
Topic for november was "What's in Travisty's Beard"

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

I created a vimeo channel with my favorite films I've found on the net.I'll be updating it frequently so feel free to subscribe. If you wanna suggest something cool just post the link in the shout box in the right hand column of the site. Click on the banner to watch my channel.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Today was the 5th anniversary of SketchCrawl. A beautiful day in San Francisco. Lots of people, awesome location, great crawl.

We sketched a little bit at the meeting point at Buena Yerba in front of the SF MOMA before we went to check out the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.After that we went back to the Buena Yerba Gardens until the end of the crawl. Congrats Enrico for the 5th year anniversary!

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

"Merry Madagascar" was aired yesterday at 8pm on NBC. It was the first project I worked on at PDI/DreamWorks. I updated the Gallery on my website with some of the work I've done for the show. It was a great pleasure to work with production designer James Wilson.

Two color keys that I painted for the show. Visit my website for more.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

I went to "APE" last Saturday. It was great to meet fellow bloggers in person.I bought an awesome snow owl paper sculpt from Brittney Lee. I'm glad that it was still there since I was aiming for it the day before.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I went to a landscape painting workshop of Huihan Liu with my colleagues from work last Saturday. It was actually my first time doing landscape painting and my second time using oils.It was a bit windy and cold but I had tons of fun and I'm looking forward to do it again sometime!

Aging International Superstar Steve Camembert stars in the 80's classic Japanese spy show "Agent Omicron"
While not popular outside Japan at the time, the show has gained cult status in the United States and Germany.
The Fans or "Cronys", as they call themselves are drawn to its campy fun and exploration of almost precient Sci-fi concepts. The ethics of cloning, genetic manipulation, nanotechnology and robot/human hybrid rights were common themes featured on the show.
An other star of the show was Japanese American actress Aiko Givewell. She played Omicrons Techy sidekick and had quite a following among the younger male audience. in the second last season her character in the series greatest twists, turned sides and became the main antagonist.
After the cancellation of Agent Omicron Ms. Givewell stared in a very short lived spinoff.
The last stand out cast member was Thud Thompson. He was a Worlds Strongest Man Champion from Sweden. He dreamed of being the Swedish Arnold Schwarzenegger. Agent Omicron was his only acting job.

One other contributing factor of the alure of the show was the mystery surrounding the death of its star. Steve Camembert killed while filming a spectacular stunt for the series final episode.
An early edit of the show was said to have put together but it was never aired. For the "Cronys" finding this episode is the holy grail.
In early 2008 it was rumored that Michael Bay was in talks to tale Agent Omicron to the big screen. He was quoted saying that he wasn't interested in making another stupid Japanese movie for kids. So for now Agent Omicron and his crew of super spies will only live on in decaying VHS tapes and Youtube...

The Making Of....

When The challenge first started we were all full of enthusiasm.
Our idea was to create an intro sequence for a fake TV series that we called "Agent Omicron".
In that sequence we would show a bunch of scenes out of the Agent Omicron Episodes. You can see in our color keys, what kind of shots we had in mind. Soon we realized that modeling and rendering whole environments with effects like rain would be too much work since we all have a full time job and could only work in the evenings and weekends. So we decided to use simple shapes and motion graphics for most of the backgrounds instead. While Kory was starting working on the animatic in After Effects I was doing test animations with Nico's rig. As soon as we had the first 15 seconds of the animatic, I sent it to my brother with a bunch of notes about what kind of music we had in mind.
When I finished animating a run cycle and the jumping action sequence of the spy, Kory's After Effects file got corrupt and he lost a huge chunk of his work.

We were doomed....the whole enthusiasm was gone and it was hard for us to keep going. For the longest time the only one that was working on the project was my brother in Japan. He finished his part fairly quickly and we got the final soundtrack a couple of weeks ago. Nico was not available for 6 weeks and the hope of being able to finish was almost gone.
A week before the deadline I talked to Kory if he is still planning to finish it and he said "YES". So we took advantage of the labor day weekend and started working hardcore. At that time our third character "Thud Thompson" wasn't even modeled yet. That's how hopeless the situation was. 70% of what you are going to see was done within 3 fairly long days. We basically skipped the animatic stage and went straight to final. I animated, lit, and rendered 48 seconds that weekend while Nico was updating the rigs on the fly, fixing skinning problems, modeling and rigging the car etc. Kory was modeling "Thud" and working with the rendered footage I provided. The intro sequence was done by thursday and luckily the deadline got extended so we had enough time to work on the 30sec Trailer and the making of. My brother arranged his soundtrack and created a jazzy version for the making of part. We had tons of fun creating this project and we are also very pleased with the result!
Hope you like it!

Thursday, August 13, 2009

I finally found time to update my website. All videos (demoreel/animations/tutorials) are hosted on vimeo. You can now stream the movies directly from my website in very good quality. I also uploaded some projects I haven't put online before.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Yesterday I went to the SFMOMA to check out the exhibitions from Richard Avedon, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams. It was a beautiful day in the City and I really enjoyed Avedon's work.Here are some sketches I did while waiting for my friends.

I recently bought this really awesome watercolor set "Cotman Watercolor Field Set Plus by Winsor & Newton". It's very handy and extremely cool for sketching outside. Combine this with a small moleskine watercolor sketchbook and you're all set! So you can expect more traditional stuff from now on. ^^

So I've been doing a tough workout five days a week early in the morning with a couple of my colleagues. One day our Trainer told us to do pull-ups and every time we come down he would punch us in the abs and we can't let go of the pull-up bar. He studied 15 years of karate and really knows how to punch :(I was bruised for a week lol....I hope this punching doesn't become a regular thing ^^

So yesterday was the 22nd world wide SketchCrawl. We met up at the Portsmouth Square in China Town for sketching. The weather was great, a bit weired cause it was very cold in the shadow and super hot in the sun. I'm glad that I brought enough layers ^^.It was an awesome crawl! I also took some video footage. I'll post it soon so stay tuned!My pages from yesterday:

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

So I went Snowboarding in Squaw Valley in Tahoe a week ago with a bunch of buddies from work. I took my Sanyo HD1010 camcorder with me to shoot some footage. I spent quiet some time last week to edit and compose this video. Besides a bunch of technical difficulties it was hell a lot of fun to create this. Enjoy! ^^

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I just updated my Photoshop Brushes in the tutorials section of my website. I got rid of some old brushes and added a bunch of new ones. I try to keep the amount of brushes fairly low. Click here to download them directly.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

I did this yesterday evening. When I was 99% done my photoshop crashed with an error message and of course I haven't saved cause it was just a speed doodle....I was upset cause I kind of liked how it turned out. So the only thing I could do is to take a screenshot of the little thumbnail in the photoshop navigator and blow it up and paint over it again. That's what I did... ^^

Friday, February 06, 2009

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Again some iPhone paintings. I'm testing a new version of "brushes". Now it's even possible to import your paintigns via wifi to your mac and playback the whole painting process at a higher resolution if desired. Another neat feature is that you can export the painting process as a movie file. Check this out!

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Since the deadline was extended by one week I somehow managed to finish my steampunk challenge entry over at cgsociety yay! I uploaded the final image 10 minutes before the deadline. That was nerve-racking!

Steampunked Cinderella

Cinderella, daughter of a wealthy pipe manufacturer, grew up in the loving care of her family until her mother died when she was six. Her father grieved for 7 years until he fell in love again with another woman, Lady Tremaine, who had 2 daughters of her own, Anastasia and Drizella. They married, but only half a year later Cinderellas father passed away as well, leaving Cinderella and all her fathers wealth and possessions in the care of her stepmother.Lady Tremaine was a hard and cold woman. She doesnt care much for Cinderellas grief and makes her do hard work in the pipe factory shortly after her fathers death. The two daughters of her own get to be Cinderellas superiors and they use every opportunity they can find to make her life a living hell.

Now only a few houses away from the pipe factory is a giant powerplant that provides electricity for the whole city. It made its owner, Albert, one of the most powerfull and richest people in the entire city. He is a honorable and loving man that cares a lot for his famiy. And when his son returns home after fighting for his country far away in the south he asks him to find a wife so that he can be sure that there will be a heir to inherit all that he has built-up. But Victor, his son, was gone for a long long time and he is unsure how he should find a woman since all the women he knew were married already or they had already forgotten about him.So his father decides to arrange a ball to which he would invite all the young unmarried women from the city.

Of course Cinderella would have loved to go to the ball as well, but she doesnt have a dress to wear. And since her stepmother inherited all the money of her father, she decides to ask her if she could help her out. But Lady Tremaine only laughs at her plea. There would be no way she would ever catch the attention of Victor, she said. Lots of girls that were much more beautiful than her would come to the ball as well. She tells her to stop daydreaming and continue with her work.

So on the night of the ball Cinderella has to stay in the factory all on her own, while Anastasia and Drizella get to take the whole day off to get ready for the big celebration that is about to happen. But suddenly, while she's sweeping the floor with tears in her eyes, a bright flash of light makes her look up. An old woman in dirty clothes and with a glowing wand in her hand appears infront of her. She introduces herself as fairy godmother and tells her that she shouldnt cry. She would help her to make it to the ball in time and she wouldnt need to worry about a thing. And without further ado she conjures up a gorgeous dress and turns an old pumpkin that was lying on the floor into a beautiful hot-air balloon which would take her directly to the ball. She adds that the magic would only last until midnight, so she had to hurry. And before Cinderella could reply there was another bright flash of light and the fairy was gone. Cinderella cant believe her luck. She swiftly puts on the dress and gets into the balloon.

Meanwhile at the ball Albert is getting dispaired of his son. Because even though all the most beautiful girls of the city are there, his son refuses to chose any of em. But then Cinderella enters the room and Victor falls in love with her on first sight. He asks her to dance with him and him and Cinderella have the times of her life. She completely loses track of time though and suddenly realizes that its almost midnight. She tells Victor that she really enjoyed her time with him but that she has to leave now. Victor tries to stop her and chases after her out of the ballroom as she's running away. He isnt able to catch up and once outside all that he can find of her is one of her slippers that she dropped.

He spends the rest of the night trying to match the slipper to the women at the ball, but none of their feet fit. He continues his search all through the next weeks until finally he finds Cinderella in the last of all places he would look, the pipe factory. And even though she doesnt look as pretty as she did in her dress on that night he instantly recognizes her beauty and asks her to marry him.

She agrees and they live happily ever after.

Here are some closeups...

I'm glad that I could inspire my brother to create a soundtrack formy entry. He imagined three sequences while composing the music: a camera move starting from above the castle, going through the village ending in the factory where cinderella is working, dreaming about a better life. I think it's pretty amazing. Check it out!

Thanks to everyone who supported me especially Kory who fed me with great ideas and brilliant suggestions throughout the challenge. And thanks to Stephan for translating the story while I was doing my last strokes on the Painting! It was a great challenge!